The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Lifted from the pages of an ancient tome penned by the heroes Jackson and Livingstone, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a role-playing reading journey of monsters, magic and traps. Choose your hero, enter the mountain and may your stamina never fail.

Pros

Where the book only has dice rolling combat, this game adds an extra layer of strategy with a grid and turn-based combat system. The battleground varies depending on location and the character you have chosen determines how you can attack on the grid. Different opponents have different attack types as well, so you must figure out the best way to attack. The enemy AI is not the best, but the fights are difficult enough.

For those that love the fights, there is gauntlet mode where the reading text is reduced to allow the player to focus on fighting. The characters allowed in gauntlet mode are not the same as story mode so that takes a bit of fun and variety out of it.

The game looks very nice. It does not have state of the art graphics, but the whole figurine hopping around a toylike play area looks very nice to me.

The music is good. Nothing spectacular, but does add nicely to the game’s atmosphere and it sounds better than the music of Fighting Fantasy Legends.

Despite the short main quest, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain has different characters to choose from. Each character has different statistics, skills and sub-quests. All this combined with the multiple pathways through the mountain gives the game a good amount of variety.

Cons

Only ONE game can be played at ONE time. I hated this in Fighting Fantasy Legends and I hate this now in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Why must they prevent players from playing multiple games simultaneously?

There are not enough shortcut keys! Sometimes the space bar can be used to continue, but that is it. Everything else must be clicked on with the mouse.

There are a few bugs in the game that rears their ugly heads randomly. In the eleven hours I have played so far, I have encountered one blank screen that required the task manager to kill the process and two instances of no options appearing to progress the game. When the options failed to appear, the only thing I could do was start a new game. Quitting and resuming the game would just continue the game at the point of having no options.

Other Points

There is a lot of reading, much like reading a book which is not surprising. There is a lot more reading in this than in Fighting Fantasy Legends.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain has some plot points which are identical to the Firetop section of Fighting Fantasy Legends. The rest of the game, I can only guess, are greater details taken directly from the book.

The game has four starting characters to choose from. As you win battles in the game, souls are gained to be used to unlock other playable characters. At the time of writing, there is a total of fifteen characters in the main game and another three in a DLC.

For people that want to cheat there is a free read mode. This mode allows you to automatically win battles, choose options that are usually locked for your given situation and resurrect unlimited times. The downside of free read mode is souls are not gained from winning battles.

This may or may not be considered to be cheating, but during dice rolling it is possible to press ‘space’ to shake the dice some more.  There is a time limit of about one second before the dice stops where you cannot shake them, so it is a bit tricky to try and rig the numbers.

There are artworks that look like they were taken directly from the pages of the book The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. They can be clicked on to display between full colour and outline versions.

Biases

I have read one Fighting Fantasy book many years ago. Cannot remember which one or even what the story was about. I do remember losing every try and eventually just skipped the dice rolling and read through to the end. It was clear I could not finish it properly before requiring to return the book. The journey was enjoyable, despite the losing.

Eleven hours of game time and out of the four characters I have tried, I have only managed to complete the main quest with one character. The game is hard, like a certain book I read many years ago.

I like Fighting Fantasy Legends and have completed it on the easiest difficulty. I have not completed all the side quests though.

Fighting Fantasy Legends

Fighting Fantasy is a series of single-player role-playing gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volume in the series was published in paperback by Puffin in 1982.

The series distinguished itself by mixing Choose Your Own Adventure-style storytelling with a dice-based role-playing element included within the books themselves, the caption on many of the covers claiming each title was an adventure “in which YOU are the hero!”

–Wikipedia

Fighting Fantasy Legends is a role-playing game based on three books from the Fighting Fantasy series, namely The Warlock of Firetop Mountain,  City of Thieves and Citadel of Chaos.

Pros

Being based on books, it is not surprising that the story is pretty good. Each book has its own area, but the game has modified the story to force you to explore other areas in order to complete any one area. Although good, it is still not as good as the likes of Baldur’s Gate.

The music is good.  There are only a handful of tracks,  so they repeat a lot, but it never got annoying for me.

The game feels more like an RPG than the books by allowing you to gain experience and level up. There are no complex statistics or skills to manage. The only things you can upgrade are skill dice and luck dice. Even your stamina (health) does not increase with levels. Upgrading your dice means adding an extra symbol to one of your dice, up to the maximum of three per die. It may not look like much but it does make a noticeable difference when you throw those dice.  This simple dice upgrade system actually gives a good sense of progression.

Cons

The game is very short. It only took me eight hours to complete the three main quests on the easiest difficulty level of adventurer and this was playing with hardcore hero mode(ie permadeath). I died and restarted twice and still finished the game in this short time. The higher difficulty levels must be unlocked by completing the easier difficulty levels, so you cannot even prolong the game by starting on higher difficulty levels.

Progress is automatically saved and there is only one game that can be saved. Every time you start a new game, your previous progress is deleted.

I wish there were more shortcut keys. Except for the space bar to “OK” some of the text and roll dice, all other options must be clicked on with the mouse. It would quicker to have 1,2,3 placed next to the options for selection or something similar.

There is not much in the way of replay value.  Yes, the higher difficulty levels are more challenging and you can configure your character differently to try out different strategies. Unfortunately, the story remains the same and the random events feel the same as well.

Combat involves rolling dice, but other than the first round, there is nothing to do except continually click OK to roll the dice until the fight has finished. There should be an auto fight option to speed things up.

Other Points

The combat in the game is different from the books. The game has swapped the six-sided dice for a whole bunch of custom dice with symbols on them. At the start, every dice only has one symbol on one side and rolling the symbol means you get one point for that roll.

The whole top-down view and animations remind me of the old action game Gauntlet. I don’t know why. Fighting Fantasy Legends moves quite slow whereas Gauntlet is a fast action game.

For a game that is based on books, there is not as much reading as I expected.

Fighting Fantasy Legends is an RPG, but movement is restricted to choices provided by the narrative. This is one aspect where the game is just like the books. More often than not, you will move forward and cannot move back. Having said that, when you reach the “end” of an area, you will have to start that area again to explore previously missed opportunities.

There are three characters to choose from, but it does not make much difference to the game. The most noticeable difference is just having a different character image. Other than that I have only seen one location where the event slightly changed based on your character.

Biases

I have only read one Fighting Fantasy book and that was in the 90s.  I cannot remember the story or even the title of the book.  I do remember not being able to level up in the book, but it was still good fun, even with the constant dying and restarting.

I have completed the game on the easiest difficulty of Adventurer, but I have not completed all the side quests.

Medal of Honor Pacific Assault

Medal of Honor Pacific Assault = MOHAA in the Pacific. The game was released 14 years ago. I played it 7 years ago. It has been given away for free on origin.com a few times. I thought, why not load it up and blast through it again. Sadly, the only thing new I have to say about MOHPA is that it has some problems running on my newer PC.

Release Date:

Pros:

Everything that made MOHAA so much fun is also in Pacific Assault. Graphics are better. Story presentation has improved with a narrated story, better cutscenes and a character with a name. Sound and music are about the same as MOHAA which is great. Fixed guns and on-rails shooting are present just enough to make the game fun without getting too boring. Of course the first-person experience has also improved with more things that can be done.

Similar to Call of Pripyat, there are options to turn off the HUD and crosshairs for a more difficult, but more immersive game.

If you get incapacitated you can bandage your wound and call for a corpsman to heal you. They do not always make it to you, so life and death depends on where you are and where your mates are. There is also a limit to the number of times you can be healed.

To accompany the cutscenes there are nice archival video footages from history. The pre-rendered and game engine cutscenes are already good, but the full motion video sequences makes it even better.

There are supplemental documentary type videos about the USMC, The Pacific War and the game.

There is also a pop-up facts feature which when turned on, displays snippets of facts as you play. It can be quite distracting, but at the same time it can be interesting.

On the harder difficulty levels, the game feels very realistic. A couple of hits and you are down. You can bleed to death. It reminded me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. somewhat.

Cons:

There is a problem with viewing pop-up facts with pause. Sometimes during a cutscene, the game would just pause for no reason without any pop-up facts. The continue key for pop-up dismissal also would not work. I had to press pause on the keyboard to continue and the cutscene would get skipped. I am not sure if this problem was present in older PCs as I have only noticed it on my current Windows 10 PC.

The game does not run smoothly on my newer Windows 10 PC. Every 2-3 minutes the game would pause for about 1 second and the HDD light would be on. I definitely did not have this problem on my older Windows 7 PC.

Sometimes the CTRL and ALT keys would stop responding. A quick fix is to ALT-Tab out of the game and then back in. These are the default keys for crouch lower and aim through iron sights/scope.

Cutscenes do not display properly in wide screen. The main game playing part displays OK.

Invisible walls are in most first-person shooters, but in Pacific Assault it is extra annoying. Trying to hide among the trees is made extra difficult because the invisible walls are so close to the main path.

Other Points:

Medal of Honor Pacific Assault is a very linear FPS, much like MOHAA before it.

The AI for your team mates have vastly improved since MOHAA. They do not do all the work for you, but at least they learnt not to stand out in the open to get shot.

Your team mates are invulnerable. They will get shot and go down, but they never die. I am unsure whether to flag this as a bad thing or a good thing, because at the higher difficulty settings, you really need their help.

There is a tutorial which is appropriately placed in the bootcamp level, but it comes after the prologue level. It is good that the tutorial teaches everything, but you have to get past the prologue first.

In one level, you pilot a plane. The flight model is very simple so flying with keyboard and mouse is manageable. Being an IL-2 fan though, I found the whole sequence a waste of time and wished I could skip it. Others may find it more fun as it does add something different to the whole running on the ground and shooting.

Biases:

Reviewed version 1.2, Director’s Edition of the game.

The online servers have been taken down and I have not had the opportunity to try Pacific Assault on LAN. So, I have no idea what mutiplayer is like.

I completed the game on hard difficulty. Strange thing is I was only given the completion medal for medium difficulty. I do wonder whether this medal downgrade was due to my changing the settings to turn off the HUD.

I really liked Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, so it’s no surprise that I like Pacific Assault as well.

I also really liked S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat.

DRM:

Uses SafeDisc.

A serial code must be entered when installing the game.

The Disc must be in the drive to play the game.

Patches:

1.2 – Patches version 1.0 to 1.2. Set check point saves in version 1.0 works after patching to 1.2, but any in between check point saves get reverted back to the previous check point save.

Minimum Requirements (as stated in the readme.txt):

• Windows XP or Windows 2000
• 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon processor
• 512 MB RAM
• 3D video card with 64+ MB video memory which fully supports DirectX 8.1
• At least 3.0 GB free space on your hard drive for Standard Edition, and 4.5 GB free space for Director’s Edition.

Computer Played On:

• Windows 7 64 bit.
• Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
• 4GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1GB RAM
• Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones.
• Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.

Handy Tips:

To skip the intro ads for Intel, THX and EA, create a new shortcut using mohpa.exe, then add +set cl_playintro 0 +set ui_skip_eamovie 1 +set ui_skip_titlescreen 1 to the shortcut. Found this from here.

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians

A first-person, party based, grid-based, real-time, very heavy tactical combat based RPG dungeon crawler that focuses on using each character’s ability in the most effective way. Although it is a real-time game, movement is grid-based and there is an active pause feature that should be used for giving commands to your troops.

Pros

Many aspects of the game’s difficulty can be adjusted. There is the usual how much damage the enemy does or how much health they have. Then there are the helpers with options like enabling auto-mapping before you find the magic map or whether you want auto pause at certain times. I cannot remember another game with this many options for tweaking the difficulty level.

The puzzles in The Fall of The Dungeon Guardians are quite clever. There is no hand-holding or even hints as to what to do. Eagle eye observation is also required for some puzzles. Many times I have passed an area and did not notice that key thing that was required for a puzzle.

In general, I hate puzzles, but I was quite impressed with how they were presented in the game. Most likely I will get stuck and start reading walkthroughs though.

The controls are very easy to use and the whole game can be controlled entirely with the mouse alone. For people like me, there are plenty of shortcut keys and they are fully customisable as well.

The music sounds nice. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of tracks so it does keep repeating. The good thing is, it does not grow annoying with time.

The graphics look very nice. It is not the best, but it still looks very nice. The animations are fluid. The lighting gives a nice dynamic effect to monsters as well as the surroundings. Objects and the environment look well detailed, although the number objects seem a bit sparse.

Cons

There is plenty of loot to collect and upgrade your party with, but there are no shops or people to buy and sell with. It makes sense because you are in a prison dungeon, but also makes the game more boring.

The characters feel very bland. There is banter between them, but they say the same thing over and over again just using different words. Every now and again they will say something useful, but overall their conversations act more like sleeping spells.

Despite the myriad of options to tweak the difficulty of the game, there is no option for monster respawning. The developer did say that they wanted players to think tactically rather than being able to grind their way to higher levels to defeat bosses, but the side effect is, backtracking to explore missed areas becomes very boring. Inspired by Might and Magic, but also more boring than Might and Magic. There are options for so many other things, why not monster respawning?

Other Points

For an RPG, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians has a reverse difficulty progression. Most RPGs get easier as you level up and so you can explore more areas. The areas you have explored tend to get easier to deal with. In this game, areas already explored become downright boring and new areas are more difficult to get through at your higher level than the previous areas at a lower level. And this is not including boss fights.

Biases

I have never played any of the Legend of Grimrock games.  I probably would not have played Fall of the Dungeon Guardians either, but it came in a nice bundle so I thought why not try it out.  Maybe one day I will try out Grimrock too.

I am one of those rare RPG players that did NOT like Eye of the Beholder.  I found it too difficult when I played it years ago.  But I am a big fan of active pause like in Baldur’s Gate and Star Wolves.  Sure enough, I think active pause is what made Fall of the Dungeon Guardians more enjoyable than Eye of the Beholder.